Like sounds of beautiful music, worship can renew us for God’s glory and our good by the invigorating power of God’s reverberating Word. It is God’s story that redeems all our stories. We want to tell it again and again as best we can, clearly conveying its message, meaning, richness, claim, and call. Through its every facet and component, worship that is biblically expositional can heighten how we proclaim God’s story, faithfully and creatively pointing to the One who alone offers us true identity, security, and destiny. “If you seek me you will find me, if you search with all your heart,” declares the Lord. With the ancient prophets and apostles we must repeat and repeat and repeat the most wonderful truth that God wants to be found. In Christian worship such tremendous and tender encounter is available to us as nowhere else.

What is the most effective way to grow a church? It's not a new methodology or cultural outreach strategy, it's...the Word of God. In this book, Jonathan Leeman wants you to realize that the Word, working through God's Spirit, is responsible for the growth of God's church and we need to trust it! Leeman not only informs and equips the leadership of local churches for greatest effectiveness in their preaching ministry but explains how to translate that into the life of the church throughout the week. The book also deals with two errors - not trusting the Word (resulting in a pragmatic ministry philosophy) and not living in light of the Word, (resulting in a ministry philosophy of "preaching is enough"). Reverberation explains the pulpit ministry and traces the theme of how the Word continues through the life of the church. Both theological and practical, Reverberation focuses on how the church hears, responds, discusses, implements and is transformed by the Word. No high-octane production, superstar personalities, or postmodern entreaties, just stuff that is really old, really good, and really powerful!

In this study, Erin Minear explores the fascination of Shakespeare and Milton with the ability of music-heard, imagined, or remembered-to infiltrate language. Such infected language reproduces not so much the formal or sonic properties of music as its effects. Shakespeare's and Milton's understanding of these effects was determined, she argues, by history and culture as well as individual sensibility. They portray music as uncanny and divine, expressive and opaque, promoting associative rather than logical thought processes and unearthing unexpected memories. The title reflects the multiple and overlapping meanings of reverberation in the study: the lingering and infectious nature of musical sound; the questionable status of audible, earthly music as an echo of celestial harmonies; and one writer's allusions to another. Minear argues that many of the qualities that seem to us characteristically 'Shakespearean' stem from Shakespeare's engagement with how music works-and that Milton was deeply influenced by this aspect of Shakespearean poetics. Analyzing Milton's account of Shakespeare's 'warbled notes,' she demonstrates that he saw Shakespeare as a peculiarly musical poet, deeply and obscurely moving his audience with language that has ceased to mean, but nonetheless lingers hauntingly in the mind. Obsessed with the relationship between words and music for reasons of his own, including his father's profession as a composer, Milton would adopt, adapt, and finally reject Shakespeare's form of musical poetics in his own quest to 'join the angel choir.' Offering a new way of looking at the work of two major authors, this study engages and challenges scholars of Shakespeare, Milton, and early modern culture.

The Force of Language illustrates how the philosophy of Language, if differently conceived, can directly incorporate questions of political thought and of emotionality, and offers the practical case of defensive strategies against the abusive speech. This follows a broad consideration of the inner voice or inner speech as a test case for a new approach to language, in particular as a way of radically rethinking the usual contrast between inner and outer through furnishing an account of how we internalize speech. The book's core offers a substantial critique of orthodox approaches to the philosophy of language form Chomsky and others; drawing on European political thought from Marx to Deleuze, it will move beyond this inheritance to explain and demonstrate its fresh conception of language at work.